The Second Language

I think it’s high time that I admit that my skill as a writer has dulled quite a bit, possibly due to the long period of time I had to abstain from afflicting cruelty to others in the form of blogging. So kindly forgive me if my posts are not forgiving enough. 😀

I am writing this post to simply ease my mind of the shameful two days which recently passed, and may return again, when I had the audacity to attempt translating the site of WordPress to my mother-tongue, Tamil. In my younger days, I was smitten with the language and its greatness, I should say.
Back in the 12th grade, there were few people who could and would compete with my command over the language, and as a result, there weren’t many confrontations. 😉

My Tamil marks weren’t even close to awesome, but I somehow had always imagined that I was good at Tamil, maybe even better than those at so-called Literature Clubs. But all the years at SASTRA where I simply whiled away the time, not making efforts to keep myself updated on the language, have now started to chortle at me. While it is true that none of the Tamil-fanatics, like a particular political fellow, for example, would never let Tamil actually ‘grow’ (by injesting new words, or borrowing from other languages in order to improve vocabulary), somehow I had fallen behind with my proficiency over my own mother tongue. It pains me, really. When I attempted the mammoth task of translating, I found there were some 1742 strings to be translated, of which I’ve currently completed 224, going at it at around a 100 strings per day. And some of them are close to a 100 words.

Technology has evolved at a quick pace, and unfortunately my mother tongue has failed to keep up with English and its pace at this matter. It is an excuse, and merely that, if one says that his/her native tongue could not compare to such an International Language. The ability to translate whole sites, and lexicons into one’s native tongue has been a facility offered to many prestigious sites, including WordPress, perhaps since their inception. Simple contributions in the form of translating a few strings you know, and verifying if the string translations provided by a few other helping hands are correct, would go a long way. But what pained me wasn’t the lack of contribution from my fellow Tamilians. It was the lack of equivalent words in Tamil (that I knew, with my limited vocabulary, maybe).

What’s the Tamil equivalent for the string: “Enter atleast 4 characters, only numbers and letters allowed”? This was the first time it choked me. In Tamil, there is no equivalent for the word ‘character’, in that sense. The only word was ezhuththu(எழுத்து), but then there would be no different word for letter, which also only had to specified using the same word. What’s the equivalent for a computer program in your mother tongue? Do you know? Download? (பதிவிறக்கம்) Upload? (பதிவேற்றம்) Username? (பயனர்பெயர்) Password? (கடவுச்சொல்) Database? (தரவுத்தளம்/தகவல்தளம்) Table? (அட்டவணை) Webmaster? (தள உரிமையாளர்) Host? (மின்புரவலர்) These were the words for which I already knew the Tamil equivalents. Then you wanna try the others I found it hard to even confirm the existence of an apt equivalent?  Moderate. Image, not photo. Constant. Spam. Cookies. Plugin. Argument (not what I’m known for, the entities in a computer program’s function!). Try it. In your own mother tongue.

And these are just the words we see almost everyday, with the internet at our feet, and never once we (maybe only I) thought of knowing the equivalent words in our own tongue. In different semantics, there are different technical terms and jargon we may not know, even in English, let alone their equivalents. Yet there are people who are looked down upon for having studied in Tamil medium, just because they know not English words. It should be them, laughing at us, for not having known these basics which they can be so proud of.

This post was to write about a few things. One, the stupid Tamil-loving fanatics are standing in their own way by not allowing Tamil to grow at as fast a pace as the industries. Tamil should be allowed to absorb foreign words, or a communion should be formed, which at least coins new native words for the rapidly increasing number of technical terms.

Two, there has to be more work done by people like us, to improve the status and standing of our respective mother tongues. People who’re with me can start by translating their favourite educational books to their own mother tongues, or if you find that daunting, at least contribute to the translation of a few good apps you use.

Three, I read here that Engineering degrees in Tamil were being offered by the TN government way back in 2010. I wonder what happened to it. And, I should say that some of the articles in the blog are worth reading over and over again.

Four, and this is just to Tamil speakers in Tamil Nadu who have studied not in Tamil-medium schools, How come we, the native speakers of our mother tongue, let Tamil become, quite literally, our Second Language? Our brothers and sisters who studied in Tamil-medium may not know all the English terms we do, but, well, their medium is Tamil, and our Tamil is, forgive me, only medium.

PS: Had to search the internet for a featured image for this post, the one that appears on the front page, and believe me, I was shocked. Type Tamil into Google, and click on Images section, and tell me the index of the first Tamil-related image you find. If it’s less than a 1000, you’re lucky.

 

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone